I am pleased to welcome you to the second annual Ireland Film Festival in Moscow. The Festival will again be a landmark celebration of Irish cinema and this year will introduce some new filmmakers to a Russian audience, to build on the success of the inaugural Festival last year.

The organisers, Gerard Michael MacCarthy and Johnny O’Reilly, have chosen a selection of Ireland’s most recent feature films, widely known Irish classics, as well as a programme of short films which I hope you will enjoy.

There will be a rich variety on offer to Moscow cinephiles over the five days of the Festival, including two very different but equally-classic Irish films. My Left Foot, released in 1989, showcased Daniel Day-Lewis in his signature role. The Commitments (1991) is perhaps the perfect example of the traditional Irish blend of music, comedy, and the rich cultural tradition of the Dublin pub. The influence of these early examples of the new Irish wave of cinema can be seen in the dark but clever comedy of later films, such as Breakfast on Pluto (2005), starring Cillian Murphy, and A Film With Me In It (2009), which will be our opening film.

I am particularly pleased to introduce the Cannes Camera D’Or prize-winning, Hunger (2008) on the 1981 hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, The Dead, based on James Joyce’s classical short story, and Micha/Lestnitsa Sveta, a Russian-language film made by an Irish writer/director and Festival organiser, Gerard Michael MacCarthy.

I hope that the Irish Film Festival will deepen cultural relations between Ireland and Russia, which have been developing from strength to strength, and become a regular event on the Moscow cultural calendar.

I take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in the Festival, the Irish Film Institute and the sponsors of the event, principally Culture Ireland and Jameson, and to thank you for coming to see Irish cinema. I hope you enjoy the films.